Alligator (17 page)

Is it true their first child was conceived under a thatched roof in the fairytale cottage lost in the enchanted forest? It is true.

COLLEEN

S
HE HAD NEARLY
been killed on the way back from sabotaging the bulldozers in the clear-cut. After almost an entire day of waiting on the side of the road a man had finally picked her up. It was already getting dark and she was soaking wet from the rain. As soon as she got into the van the man’s cellphone rang.

He said, Russell here. He glanced over at Colleen wearily and he reached to turn up the heat and the phone fell down the neck of his coat. He scrabbled to catch it, making the van swerve. He listened and pressed his hand to his forehead and said, Sandra, Sandra. Then he put the cellphone on his leg. Colleen could hear a shrill voice rattling away into his thigh.

What do you think you’re doing? he asked Colleen. Do you know how dangerous hitchhiking is?

Then he picked up the cellphone and said, Sandra, let me explain. He listened.

He said, Let me say something here. Let me speak. You were told. I already told you. Just let me. Talk, for Jesus’ sake.

He glanced at Colleen. The woman continued, there was crying now. Then he quietly folded the cellphone and dropped it in his pocket.

Nice night, he said. The cellphone rang and rang in his pocket.

I’m getting your seat soaking wet, Colleen said.

Do you have any idea how dangerous hitchhiking is? I said to myself, Don’t lecture.

The phone rang and they listened to it ring for a long time then it stopped ringing. When they were certain it wouldn’t ring any more the man said, I didn’t get your name.

Then the phone started again and he answered it.

I’m with someone, Sandra, he said. A hitchhiker. A young girl. She was hitchhiking. Yes, a hitchhiking girl. Yes, I told her. I said, it’s not safe. I said, Girls your age. Sandra, I said all that. He looked at Colleen and rolled his eyes. The weeping on the cellphone started again. Colleen could hear it clearly, a breathy, snot-slickened crying, alternating with a high whine, a unique calibrated chuffing of breath.

Tell me this much, he said.

The woman began to outright bawl.

Sandra, Sandra, he said. And he hung up once more. Then, in the blooming quiet that followed the static and bawling on the phone, the windshield made a fist of itself. A fist of glass lined with silver wrinkles and cracks, and the fist punched Colleen in the face. The van had tipped over on its side, the passenger door scraping the pavement leaving a burst of orange sparks, her cheek against the window, and then it tipped again and they were upside down and the van slid over an embankment on its roof, a curtain of gravel and weeds racing over the smashed windshield.

They came to a stop, upside down, and nose first in a shallow pond, the roof of the van burbling with black water smelling of muck.

Colleen was hanging by her seat belt and the airbag was jammed under her chin and there was a dust floating in the air, which she guessed was a flame retardant and it coated her tongue and tasted like metal filings and talcum.

The guy, Russell, it took her a full moment to realize, was speaking to her as if from a great distance.

Wake up, he said. They heard two vehicles zoom past on the highway above them, then three or four more.

I never got your name, he said. She felt her nose spread with homesickness.

Whatever was going on with her nose, it felt like acute grief.

But she couldn’t remember what she was sad about. She had enough time to realize that whatever it was she was sad about was a tremendous weight she had been dragging around for a long time and whatever it was it was a relief not to remember.

She wanted not to remember for as long as she could because it was a tremendous relief.

Then she remembered: she missed her stepfather.

And because she had taken that brief break from thinking about his death, which she had been thinking about for four years, a break that had to do with having her face smashed in, a break that had to do with nearly dying herself, because of that very brief uplifting rest, the grief came back triplefold.

It was a sock in the gut and she lost her breath, which also may have had to do with the airbag and maybe a fractured rib.

She’d had a glimpse of something as they tumbled over on the pavement and then slid down the embankment on the roof of the van — every future moment would be without him.

Everything to come would not have David in it. She hadn’t really looked that far ahead yet.

Now she saw.

A door had slammed between the past and the present, with the same kind of force that had driven her into the windshield. Her stepfather was behind that door. There would be no reprieve from this, no let-up.

Colleen would become whoever and David would not see.

She couldn’t ask, Are you proud? She remembered the dress she had worn to the funeral, but she could not think what shoes she had worn. This is what grieved her, hanging upside down in the van on the side of the highway with her nose most likely broken. She had wanted to preserve every detail of the funeral. But she could not for the life of her remember what shoes.

What happened? she said.

We hit a moose.

That was some phone conversation.

Or we hit something, he said.

You were asleep at the wheel.

I should have broken up with my girlfriend a long time ago.

Now it’s too late.

I was suddenly struck is what happened, he said. She tried to think of the shoes. She could see herself getting dressed, brushing her hair, she’d put in tortoiseshell combs, she could see the tights — she never wore tights but she’d bought a pair for the funeral.

The next thing you’re in the grave, Russell said. The water on the roof seemed to be rising. It occurred to Colleen the van might be resting on some kind of ridge and what if it gave and they sank to the bottom of what might be a deep lake and what if they were never heard from again. Brown suede high heels. She’d worn Jennifer Galway’s prom shoes to David’s funeral. Jennifer Galway had put her arm around Colleen in the parking lot of the funeral home and gave her a little pinch. She’d pinched her arm to keep Colleen from crying.

My stepfather died, she said.

And you’re out hitchhiking in the dark.

I’m out in the dark, all by my lonesome.

What would your stepfather think of that?

I guess we’ll never know.

Because we almost died ourselves here, he said.

Maybe we are dead. He turned and looked at her then and her chin, which he could see from the light in the dash, was covered in blood.

I don’t want children, he said. Colleen thought suddenly of her mother.

Oh my God, she said. How angry her mother was going to be when she found out Colleen had nearly died. Her mother could not afford, emotionally speaking, to have anyone else she knew come anywhere near death, not remotely near, ever again.

I’ve got a couple of nieces, Russell said.

I’m Colleen, she said. The water had definitely stopped rising. She wanted to get out of the van. She should never have said her name.

A couple of nieces are plenty, Colleen.

But your girlfriend, she said. She could see Russell wasn’t ready to leave the van. They might sit there forever as far as he was concerned.

My girlfriend can’t take too much more.

Are my teeth broken?

You’ve got blood.

That’s from my nose, but are my teeth?

Smile at me. Jesus, you’re pretty.

I’m covered in blood.

But you’re. What are you? You’re up to no good. Let me get a tissue. The box of Kleenex that had been on the dash was turning in the water below them, a tissue stood up like the sail of a boat. Russell reached down and snatched the tissue and he handed it to Colleen.

This is for free, Colleen. There’s only one life. There’s not the life you are living and the life you might have lived. Do you know what I’m saying?

This has been informative, Colleen said. You’re an informative guy.

I’m sorry about your stepfather.

Then they heard a strange warble, like a bird they might have crushed under the roof. Something crushed and submerged and it took them both a moment to recognize the faint green light under the water on the roof of the van as the cell-phone. It made them giggle. It was still ringing.

Colleen wedged her feet against the dash and undid her seat belt and managed to work her way around the airbag so she was kneeling on the ceiling of the van in a foot of water.

She couldn’t open her door but Russell had kicked out the broken glass from the windshield on his side and she crawled out through there and stood wobbly-legged, bleeding from her nose with a tissue to her face. She tilted her head to stop the bleeding and the stars were bright. There was a dark shape standing against the trees and it took her a long time to believe it was a moose. She did not believe until she saw it turn and disappear into the trees and heard the swooshing branches. She suddenly remembered her knapsack. She’d lost her knapsack and everything was in it. The remaining sugar and her diary. Some money, her name, her phone number.

Russell said she needed to get to a hospital. He was worried about whiplash and concussion and God knows what injury and insurance and who was her guardian?

She had already got a car to stop and several other cars had pulled over and he was talking to a man who had been in the woods hunting and she told him goodbye and he said, Hey wait a minute. But she got in and waved goodbye. Of course, back in St. John’s, he’d made inquiries and she’d been caught.

MADELEINE

S
HE
’
D TAKEN THE
money from her producer’s fee, which means she personally will make nothing at all, nothing to speak of. But now there are skylights for the set. Guy is happy. She would not be shouted at in front of the crew, she told him, just as if he were a child. She was harsh with him behind the closed door of her office.

I will not have it, she’d said. Then she gave in about the bloody skylights and his face got pink. He kissed both her cheeks. He left her office in a great hurry and no sooner had he closed her door than he’d opened it again and came striding in and leaned over her desk, knocking an empty cup to the floor, kissed her on the mouth and left, slamming the door, rattling the frosted glass. She was exhausted and she had broken a sweat and figured she wouldn’t be around to spend the producer’s fee anyway.

Never mind about the fee, she thought. She’d been having nightmares about the sequence with the white stallions in the snow. Every night she was dreaming the editing suite, the horses galloping in reverse, disappearing altogether. The whole film eating itself up until there was nothing left.

How much easier things might have been if she hadn’t had a career. She thinks of it that way; the way women in eighteenth-century novels sit in drawing rooms and take up their embroidery. Some heroine slighted by a lover blushes fiercely, and takes up her sewing. She had taken up film and before film she was lost in the children.

She thinks of the suffocating, addictive sweetness of being a mother. How noble and foolhardy: to think she could care for two helpless beings. How enveloping it had all been, and over so quickly though it had felt interminable; the driving alone had taken a lifetime. She’d had to drive here and there in every weather, the birthday parties and Brownies and Cubs, swimming at Bowring Park, while Marty was at the office.

She thinks of the karate instructor. He is absolutely present to her; the cinematographer’s stubble had stung her chin. Every move the karate instructor made was fluid and effortless; his foot was strong and frankly erotic and the loose pyjamas were erotic and even the fluorescent light was erotic, and the quiet squeak from his bare foot on the tile was deeply, deeply erotic. She was exhausted from all the driving with the children.

I could have driven with my eyes closed, she thinks.

Thirty years ago when the children were young, she’d get the script she was writing out of her purse for the red lights; she’d have a pencil tucked behind her ear, and she’d turn a page. People would blast their horns because the light was green. She didn’t give a damn about other drivers. They would just have to wait.

She drove Melissa to ballet and Andrew to karate. Karate was new, a guy had come down from the mainland and he’d set up a school. She’d definitely had some kind of crush on the karate instructor, a tickertape parade drumming through her veins when his foot squeaked on the tiles.

This was before her career had taken off.

This was before she left Marty. The divorce had been nasty because he refused everything, would keep nothing for himself, and she burst into tears. Keep the leather couch at least, a battleship of a couch that had been in his family for years, but he said before the judge about the children needing good furniture, and all the courtroom saw she had failed to hold it together: the magnificent project that was true love. She had put her arms around it, locked her fingers tight, strained every muscle, and it had busted apart anyway. Marty had looked bewildered in the courtroom. It was not kindness — giving her the couch — he had no further interest in the couch. He’d watched her press forward with the details of divorce with numb, vivid bewilderment. He refused to sign things, left long pauses in the proceedings. Once, a brick came through her window at night but she could not be sure who’d thrown it. He held things up as best he could. And then, when the last
t
was crossed, he’d shown up at a party with a young cellist. He’d left an extra button on his shirt undone, showing chest hair. He had undone the button or had forgotten to do it up — such was the liberating nature of the relationship he’d fallen into with the cellist. In fact the shirt was buttoned all wrong — at a party thrown by their closest friends. The tail of his shirt hung out like a flag.

She’d left, in the end, because there were so many things she’d had to chase after — all the racing around. When she thinks of
chasing after
she sees herself in the laundry room on Lime Street listening intently for the origin of a leak. There was a pool of water seeping from beneath the washing machine. She ran her fingers over the pipes, feeling for a seeping crack. But it wasn’t the chasing after. The truth was she had been unable to see her marriage from any kind of reasonable vantage point —that was the problem — because she was so immersed. She had been swallowed up, forgot who she was.